Eugene trembled and City Hall was evacuated Wednesday morning while an earthquake in northwest Washington sent bricks falling to the streets of Seattle, cracked a column in the state’s capitol dome in Olympia and left thousands of Washington residents without power.
On campus, several buildings, including Johnson Hall and PLC were rocking, but none received damage and no one was injured.
At 10:55 a.m., the earthquake, centered in Olympia, Wash., with a magnitude of 6.8, sent shocks through the Pacific Northwest, compelling the city manager’s office to evacuate City Hall.
In her office on the ninth floor of PLC, political science assistant professor Julie Novkov experienced the earthquake at the top of the tallest building on campus, which is also one of the tallest in Eugene.
She said she noticed her computer monitor starting to shake, and when she realized what was happening, she headed for the stairs.
“I was just processing the fact that this was an earthquake, and I needed to get out of the building,” she said.
Novkov said it was the first earthquake she experienced and “hopefully, my last.”
While she said she isn’t too concerned about aftershocks, Novkov said she hopes the University takes the proper steps to ensure PLC doesn’t collapse in any later quakes.
“I hope they check this building over thoroughly, and soon,” she said.
Dawna Miller, a city manager’s assistant who was inside City Hall during the earthquake said “it felt like my chair was rocking forward and back, forward and back.”
“We just had everybody leave the building. We checked the building for structural damages and found none,” she said.
Police blocked off Eighth Avenue between High and Pearl Streets during the evacuation, forcing a few Lane Transit District buses to reroute.
Ike Jenson, Lane County emergency management coordinator, said his office has received no reports of earthquake-related damage in the county.
And Greta Pressman, campus relations director with Facilities Services, said there was “no reported damage,” though she heard several campus buildings rocked through the earthquake that lasted less than a minute.
Doug Toomey, an associate professor of geology, said while earthquakes can be destructive, they also relieve some of the seismic pressure along continental plates that may prevent a large quake in the future.
“Whenever there’s an earthquake, it does release pressure,” he said.
He said the Northwest is a prime area for earthquakes because it is near where the Juan de Fuca continental plate is slowly moving below the North American plate, creating a subduction area.
“That gives rise to considerable types of stress,” he said.
While California has the reputation for earthquakes, Toomey said they are more frequent in Washington and Oregon then most people realize. He said seismic activity is common, but just on a geological time scale that is far different from a human sense of time.
“It’s probably rare on our scale, but it’s not that rare for the area,” he said.